Macedonia's prime minister won a landslide election victory but gunfights and allegations of fraud that marred the poll threatened to undermine the country's European aspirations.

Nikola Gruevski's gamble to call elections two years ahead of time paid off, with his center-right conservatives winning 48.3 per cent of the vote yesterday, far ahead of the Social Democrats' 23.4 and enough to give him a majority in the 120-seat parliament.

The 37-year-old prime minister campaigned on an agenda stressing national pride following bitter disappointment and anger after Greece blocked Macedonia from joining NATO in April because of a dispute over the Balkan country's name.

But with one person killed and eight wounded in gunbattles in ethnic Albanian areas in the first hours of voting, and reports of ballot fraud, Gruevski could have damaged his country's efforts to prove it is a strong candidate for EU and Nato membership.

"If you ask about the political consequences of the situation of the elections, then they will be long-term ... and also negative ones. The international standing of the country has been undermined seriously," said political analyst Biljana Vankovska.

"Yesterday was probably for many of us the worst possible outcome. Despite all the indications, we were quite surprised to see that amount of violence, even the loss of a human life, and I believe that many citizens here are simply distressed."

Voting was suspended in 22 polling stations - 1 per cent of the country's total - in ethnic Albanian areas because of intimidation, violence or reports of fraud. Reruns will be held in those areas in two weeks.

Ethnic Albanians make up about a quarter of Macedonia's 2.1 million people, and ethnic Albanian rebels fought a six-month insurgency in 2001.

But divisions have escalated since then between the minority's two main parties: the Democratic Union for Integration led by former rebel leader Ali Ahmeti and Menduh Thaci's Democratic Party of Albanians.

Winners: Supporters of the rulling party celebrate their victory in parliamentary elections

Winners: Supporters of the rulling party celebrate their victory in parliamentary elections

The DUI won 11.1 per cent of the vote Sunday, slightly ahead of the DPA's 10.2."Butchery" ran the one-word banner headline on the daily Vest. "Bloody elections" headlined the Utrinski Vesnik.

"Macedonia did not only say farewell to common sense but also said goodbye indefinitely to ambitions to join the EU and Nato," the Dnevnik daily said in an editorial.In his victory speech, Gruevski insisted his country was determined to move toward Europe.

"Macedonia has the power to go ahead. The country has the energy for progress, to join NATO and EU," Gruevski he said.

"I regret the violence and incidents that broke out in Macedonia's northwest, in the areas with ethnic Albanians," he said. "But the vote was mostly fair and peaceful in the rest of the country."

But Erwan Fouere, head of the European Union office in Macedonia, said the events were "a great cause for concern," and that it was "absolutely vital" for those responsible to be held accountable.

"If there is no followup then impunity will continue, and this is not acceptable standards for a democratic society aspiring to join the European Union," he said.

The violence also highlighted dangerous divisions within the ethnic Albanian community. Intra-ethnic tension escalated after the 2006 election, when Gruevski picked the DPA as a governing coalition partner even though it had won less votes than Ahmeti's DUI.

"One would expect an ethnic community to unite itself around some strategic goals for that community, but it is obviously not the case," said Vankovska, the political analyst.

"I think the reason for that is the perception or the goal ... of the political parties not to fight for the benefit of their community or collective rights, but to secure access to state resources, access to privileges, to jobs, to finances, and to somehow satisfy the party soldiers."